Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) – he of the stick-thin figures who, thanks to a brush with Jean-Paul Sartre in the ’40s, became the poster boy for existentialism in art; and who, thanks to a $141 million record at auction earlier this year, is now the poster boy for expensiveness in art – isn’t synonymous with portraits. He did people, for sure; even during a flirtation with surrealism in the 1920s, his sculptures related to bodies. But your actual living, breathing folk with names and thoughts and hairdos? Not so much.
It is these works that are the subject of the National Portrait Gallery’s powerful new show. Rather than place Giacometti at the heart of the Parisian avant-garde, making zombie-sculptures doomed to pace the hinterlands of a devastated Europe, this exhibition presents him as a family man, drawing, painting and sculpting his mum, dad, brother Diego and, later, his wife Annette, while returning often to the mountains of his native Switzerland. The earliest work here, a bust of Diego, was made by Giacometti when he was 13. He originally sculpted it in Plasticine and kept it close to him throughout his life, viewing it with ‘a degree of envy and nostalgia’; its easy charm can perhaps be put down to beginner’s luck. ‘Diego’s head is the one I know best,’ he said, adding later that ‘the most difficult thing to do is what’s familiar’.
The ‘Pure Presence’ of the show’s title comes from Sartre, but it doesn’t quite fit. Full of distortions that accentuate the problems of looking at, knowing and recording a human likeness, Giacometti’s art is anything but ‘pure’. He worked small from the beginning, finding that, even though he was determined to copy what he saw before him, his subjects appeared to shrink away the more he looked. In Switzerland during WWII he made work so tiny that he was able to bring it back to Paris in matchboxes. His subsequent elongations of form were inspired by seeing one of his models from a distance in the street, engulfed by the space around her.
It’s in these accentuations that Giacometti makes the ordinary and the everyday seem heroic. However, there are works here that remain humdrum. A painting of millionaire collector G David Thompson (1957), for example, looks dutiful rather than dynamic. But ‘Bust of Diego’ (1955) – comprising two flattened forms placed on top of one another so that, at any one time, either head or torso appears reduced to a blade – summarises the profound message of Giacometti’s art: that, however much you think you know someone, people are always a puzzle.